thank God for backing up the back ups!

[visual800]

Not only do i run two comps that are identical I also keep 3-4 copies of the info on seperate Hard drives that i have laying round via a usb sata-ide cable. needed some info from a couple years back and pulled out one of the hard drives hooked it up and it wouldnt read and had alot of clicking on it. unhooked it threw it in trash and got another one, worked fine

I dont understand what happens to hard drives that are just sitting around and they just decide to die for no reason or no warning. I plugged in one a couple months back and was holding it and it burned the hell out of my hand i mean smoking hot. They are in a dark closet ina box, i mean really?

 

[slipperyfrog]

There is a reason all manufacturers have or are reducing their warranties on hard drives. I purchase ones that have the longest warranties so that I can replace the drive if needed. I never trust the drive to keep my information safe. I keep at least one on site backup and one offsite. If you can jump on cloud storage...all the better. The bigger and faster drives get the more likely they are to fail.

 

[David Wright]

There is a reason all manufacturers have or are reducing their warranties on hard drives. I purchase ones that have the longest warranties so that I can replace the drive if needed. I never trust the drive to keep my information safe. I keep at least one on site backup and one offsite. If you can jump on cloud storage...all the better. The bigger and faster drives get the more likely they are to fail.

I believe that. My 1.5 year old Dell system drive just went capoot. No advance warning, clicking, nothing. It is a 1tb drive but the good news Dell shipped a new one free of charge right away. As far as I know that is beyond warranty unless they know these drives have issues.

Online backups are good for incremental backups but if you want to image a whole drive, a usb drive or other onsite backup is needed.

 

[choucove]

Over the past year at our computer office we have noticed an increased number of hard drive failures, our own and customers. As mentioned above, manufacturers recently announced they were going to be dropping the warranty coverage on many of their hard drives because they know they aren't built to the same quality that they once were.

For several years I have used Seagate hard drives without issues. However, we suddenly started experiencing failures in a staggering number of their drives after about a year of usage or less in some cases. Several 250 GB, 320 GB, 500 GB, and 1.5 TB hard drives that we saw from Seagate were failing well before their 3 year warranty expiration, and in fact unfortunately some of the drives that came back directly from Seagate as replacements for those failed hard drives ALSO failed within a short period.

Since then we have made a switch over to Western Digital hard drives. So far we have only had two failures in their hard drives, and those were practically a DOA occurrence. One was a Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB hard drive and the other was a Western Digital Caviar Blue 500 GB hard drive. However, given the dozens and dozens that we have used now, this is a much lower failure rate than we were seeing with Seagate.

Basically, just don't trust your hard drives. We see them fail all the time. If you're using an external hard drive to store all of your data and have no other backup of that data you are asking for trouble. Hard drives aren't near as cheap as they used to be, but they are well worth the investment to make a couple backups of your data.

 

[signswi]

A significant HD parts manufacturer (read arm) was offshoring all it's operations which were then wiped out by the south sea flooding, what, a year ago now? Just one small example of the types of things causing the industry to basically fall apart.

Buy SSDs.